Eat More. Weigh Less. Win!

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I was reading some articles on nutrition and obesity yesterday and I had one of my “depressed and confused” moments that I get from time to time. Ever since I have started seriously trying to figure out a good diet for myself, I have times where I get overwhelmed by how much contradictory information is out there. When it comes to nutrition you can find an “expert” who will take a contrary view on just about anything. Some will tell you that saturated fats are the devil, and others will say eggs and butter are perfectly healthy and should be back on the menu. Some advise you to restrict fruit and eliminate all grains. If you read enough for long enough you won’t feel safe eating anything! If someone starts trying to prove that drinking fresh water and breathing clean air is bad for you I won’t be surprised. So what is an ordinary, struggling person to make of all this? I am not a dietician, doctor or personal trainer, but I have been to many of them, and have tried their advice with limited success. I have no wish to become an “expert” on any of this, but I do feel compelled to learn enough to navigate my own way through the maze of nutritional advice in an effort to recover my health and well-being. After all, if my weight is my “personal responsibility” then I need enough reliable information to behave responsibly, don’t I? Yet when I see how even the experts can’t agree at the most basic level, I think I must be naive in the extreme to think that I can work this all out for myself.

The only way I can stop myself from going stark raving bonkers is to think about what has been going on in my own body in the last few months. I can’t help but conclude that something is working. My diet is a success by every possible metric of success that means anything to me:

My diabetes is controlled without medication.

I am no longer hypertensive.

I have lost 26 kgs and 5 dress sizes in 4 months.

I sleep like a baby, have plenty of energy and get restless if I sit still for too long whereas I was barely able to move off the couch before.

I have no cravings, never get ravenously hungry and love my food enough to eat this way forever.

My skin and hair look noticeably better and healthier.

People are starting to comment.

I am no longer plagued by headaches, diarrhea, constipation, excessive thirst or getting up multiple times a night to use the loo.

I get on the scale every morning and every morning I weigh a little less. The weight loss will stop for a few weeks from time to time, and then resume on it’s own. This stop/start progress seems unrelated to my food intake or activity level in that I am eating and exercising fairly consistently whether I am losing or not. But there is a definite, steady downward trend and as long as that continues I can just keep doing what I am doing for as long as it takes.

I should be over the moon, so why do I still have crushing moments of self-doubt? I’ll tell you:

My diet is not low-fat enough for the low-fat people. Even though I have a pair of old pants so big that they simply drop off me (they fit a year ago!), I worry that I may be clogging my arteries with coconut oil or raising my bad cholesterol by eating too many eggs.

My diet is not low-carb enough for the low-carb people. Sure, I have cut out all refined grains, haven’t touched a white potato in months and have greatly reduced my sugar intake. But I still eat any fruit I damn well please, pretty much whenever I feel like it and I flatly refuse to cut out whole grains and legumes.

My diet is not low-calorie enough for the low-calorie diet police. Without really trying I am eating far more human-sized portions and not having seconds, but I eat when I am hungry and stop when I am full and that means more calories than a committed calorie counter would think prudent and certainly far too many to explain my rate of weight loss under the “calories in/calories out” model.

I cook too much of my food for the raw foodists and refuse to juice my veggies and throw away the precious fiber.

The amount of eggs and dairy I eat would make a vegan cry. (Raw milk btw, which is illegal in some countries! Not mine apparently.)

I eat no meat or fish at all and any self-respecting cave man would laugh me to scorn. (In my defense I supplement with fish oil, but that’s as far as it goes!)

By just about any diet theory out there I should be getting fatter, not thinner. Sicker, not healthier. Robert Lustig argues that the common features of all successful, healthy diets is that they are low in sugar and high in fiber and that is about the only thing that makes a modicum of sense to me. I think his argument at least partly explains it, because I get fiber every which way I can think of and watch sugar like a hawk (although I probably eat more than he would like me to and I do use alternative sweeteners like xylitol and stevia, which I understand is risky until there is more research on these). However, I would suggest that there is a third feature of a successful diet that is just as important: you have to love it enough to marry it and live happily ever after! You can’t be fantasizing about when it will all be over and you can eat chips again!

My recent diet blues have given me a shocking insight. I think the problem with the Western diet is that people no longer know how to feed themselves! Food is a veritable battle ground and the struggle for control begins from the moment someone “plays aeroplane” with a spoonful of pureed carrots and tells you to “open wide.” A critical part of early development is to move a child from breast milk to solid food, teach them the child to eat a healthy, balanced diet, and ultimately to procure and prepare food for themselves. But something has gone horribly wrong and grown adults have reverted to an infant state where we let a variety of “experts” play aeroplane with us while we “open wide” and swallow the whole thing! Most of us have given up on feeding ourselves and alternate between letting the food industry or the diet industry feed us. Or both at once, because the food industry has a product line for every recommendation the diet industry ever came up with!

Until very recently I believed that my weight problem was 100% my personal responsibility, just like the food industry told me it was. Nothing anyone else could say or think of me for being fat was anything close to the hateful things I said to myself when I looked in the mirror. When I was diagnosed with diabetes my only emotion was shame. The voice in my head said “You did this to yourself, you know!” The problem was I thought taking “personal responsibility” meant “making healthy choices” in a supermarket, based on the information they saw fit to provide. Once I realized that this “information” is concocted by their marketing department and the only motive is profit, I started to realize how heavily the deck was stacked against me all along. The aisles in the supermarket are as gaudy and colorful as the Vegas Strip, and just as much of a gamble. No matter how much you are tempted to roll the dice, just remember that the house always wins!

I just finished watching “The Men Who Made Us Fat.” The inescapable conclusion is that taking “personal responsibility” doesn’t mean “making healthy choices” and going for a brisk walk after lunch. It means telling the whole food industry to go to hell and take their “food products” and “labels” with them! They never have and never will have our best interests at heart, so let’s be done with them as much as we possibly can! I realize this may be well near impossible, but at least we can try to send a bit of a message. They can’t be trusted to put 2 ingredients together without jeopardizing our health so if you do buy anything from them it better not need a label or if it does, it should have as few ingredients as possible and you should be able to pronounce all of them.

I had a very different shopping experience the other day buying some fruit and veg from a local farmer. She was remarkably unassuming, just standing behind a table filled with her fresh produce and a scale. Not a price or a label in sight. There was nothing eye-catching, no “specials” no advertising, no “health claims” of any kind and I don’t think anyone was standing around to study my buying behavior! She had grown it all, she hadn’t messed with it and now she was selling it. Since she was there in person she could answer any questions I wanted to put to her:

“Hi, lovely tomatoes you have today. Where do you grow them?”

She pointed, indicating just up the road – “Over there ma’am.”

“When did you pick them?

“This morning ma’am.”

“Are they organic?”

Sounding vaguely offended: “Of course ma’am, we only sell organic here.” (I should have known better than to ask, she wouldn’t have been allowed to sell at this market if it wasn’t, no labeling required!)

Sure the small farmer also has a profit motive. She needs to make a living just like the rest of us. But it’s a profit motive I can work with. She just has a little to sell and, judging by the queues of people who, like me, have come looking for a bit of real food, she is going to sell out before the day is over. And then she packs up and goes home. She has no incentive to employ any special tactics to get anyone to buy more than they need. She has some seasonal fruit and veg. If it’s not in season, you’re out of luck, if you want it you can buy it, when it’s sold out, that’s the end. I leave this shopping trip, well pleased with the day’s purchases and start thinking about what I will make for dinner.

So why is my diet working? I am not sure, but I think it has something to do with who is feeding me these days. It’s not about personal responsibility but shared responsibility. My part was finding a few reasonably honest people committed to producing real food, taking it home and making something decent with it. Their part was not trying to push more and more food down my throat until I explode! 🙂

I am far from smug about this. I realize that it is an unbelievable privilege to live within easy travelling distance of so much fertile farm land, and that some of that land is still in the hands of small farmers. I am incredibly lucky that I have money to buy food and that the food I want and need is cheap enough to fit my budget. I am one of a tiny percentage of people left in the world who can do this. I shudder to think about people in inner cities with too little money and too many cheap calories and not a vegetable in sight. Or people who have been alienated from their land, struggling with poverty, drought and famine who haven’t got enough to eat at all. Maybe it’s time to stop sitting in a corner feeling ashamed of our personal failings and time to start asking some hard questions about who is feeding us. Time to learn to eat our veggies without parental or government supervision, prepare our own food and stop “opening wide” for the guy with a large fork and an even larger profit motive! Maybe it’s time to share and make sure that everyone has enough and no one has too much. Time for more real food, no more drive-throughs and definitely no more diets! How’s that for a radical idea?

I think it is unhelpful to tell hungry fat people to eat less. However, I am absolutely convinced that the desired behavior is for them to eat less, and by “less ” I mean fewer calories, especially from refined and processed foods. Although we can argue about all the factors that contribute to weight gain, an excessive intake of calories is clearly at least one of them. Interestingly, in the process of eating fewer calories one may end up eating a greater volume of food and a lot more nutrients, and that is a good thing and just goes to show that just saying “eat less” without explaining what you mean by that and how to achieve it is pointless.

I do not defend overeating, but I do seek to understand it. My quest for understanding begins with myself. It has lead me to the conclusion that although the desired outcome is that I eat fewer calories, this is unachievable without first addressing the problem of hunger.

Here’s what I know: If you are hungry and you have access to food, sooner or later you are going to eat. What is more, the hungrier you are by the time you give in to the urge to eat, the more you are likely to overeat and the less healthy and rational your food choices will be. That’s the bad news. On the flip side, the good news is that if you eat in such a way that you are nourished and satisfied and your hunger is well managed then you will be able to eat more appropriate amounts relatively easily. Of course while it is quite possible to overeat when you are NOT hungry purely because food is there and it tastes good, it is not inevitable and it becomes relevant to talk about things like will power, self control and common sense. However, if you are hungry all of that goes out of the window and you can no more prevent yourself from overeating than you can hold your breath indefinitely.

So here are the top 10 things that work for me. As I write this I am grateful that I can afford to eat in this way and embarrassed that I squandered this privilege by eating badly when there are people in the world that genuinely have nothing to eat or are unable to afford healthy food. My experience of hunger and obesity is very much a problem of affluence, and fortunately the solution is also within my grasp because of my privileged economic position. In future posts I will write about how much more complicated the problem becomes when poverty is factored into the equation.

1) Eat a hearty breakfast as soon after waking as possible. I know your mother already told you this, but this one really is non-negotiable! According to the National Weight Control Registry 78% of people who maintain their weight loss in the long term eat breakfast every day. There are many reasons for eating breakfast including: kick starting your metabolism for the day, maintaining energy and blood sugar levels etc. The main reason for me is that it is at breakfast where the battle against hunger for the day is won or lost. I was one of the “not hungry for breakfast” people who then started bingeing on refined carbs from midmorning until bedtime. The thought of food first thing in the morning made me nauseous. Now my stomach screams for breakfast like an angry baby until it is fed, and then my appetite gradually tapers off throughout the day until by evening I am done with food and ready to close the kitchen. I have gone from eating my main meal at night, followed by incessant mindless snacking in front of the TV to not even particularly needing to eat an evening meal and being perfectly comfortable with a salad or an apple. I did NOT do this by deciding to eat less at night. I did it by eating more for breakfast!

2) Drink Water! Especially: First thing when you wake up (with some lemon juice if you like) and half an hour before meals. Then drink as much throughout the day as possible. By drinking more water I have stopped drinking other beverages including fruit juice and diet soda (do I even need to bother to mention regular soda?). I don’t talk a lot about “cutting out” anything from my diet except when it comes to sugary or artificially sweetened drinks. These simply have to go and a habit of water drinking is critical to success.

3) Eat at regular intervals throughout the day. Don’t allow yourself to become hungry before you eat but don’t eat past the point of satiety either. End the meal when you feel comfortable, but not “stuffed.” Initially I found that three meals and two snacks worked well for me but now I struggle to manage more than two meals and one to two snacks. My schedule is: Breakfast first thing, mid morning snack, lunch, light supper. I didn’t decide that I would eat fewer meals and snacks. I ate more earlier in the day and ended up eating less by default because it’s all I can manage.

4) Include a lean protein, a small amount of healthy fat, and plenty of fiber with every meal. Bulk out the meal as much as possible with non-starchy vegetables. This combination works best because you get a sustained feeling of fullness, both from the quantity of food and the composition. I measure proteins, fats and carbohydrates very carefully and throw caution to the wind when piling on the non starchy vegetables. I find that if I just eat a big plate of steamed vegetables I still get hungry, but if I include appropriate portions of protein and fat and occasionally some whole grains, I am sated until my next meal. I also make sure to include protein with every snack.

5) Limit your intake of grains and make sure they are really whole grains. I say this because the more grains I eat the more I want to eat. Basically they make me hungrier! They also push my blood sugar too high. Now I know that there is a lot of talk about going gluten free or grain free these days, and if that works for you good and well. I just don’t feel good on a completely grain free diet, both physically and in terms of satisfaction with my meals. However, I do make sure that I buy my grains from good sources, and prepare them myself. I have also tried to make sure I eat diverse grains and severely restrict my intake of wheat and corn. Learning to cook with quinoa, buckwheat and amaranth has been fun and enjoyable. I do not eat any grain-based food product from a supermarket or convenience store because I just don’t trust it and I try to eat no more than 2 measured portions of whole grains a day.

6) Smoothies, Soups and Salads are your best friends and can form the basis of your meal plan. I love all three because they are satisfying, bulky and an easy way to introduce major nutritional variety. If I am short of ideas on what to eat I will have a smoothie for breakfast, soup for lunch and a salad for supper.

7) While you are still trying to control hunger, there are some great low cal or no cal options to create a feeling of fullness in-between meals and snacks. My favorites are: Green Tea – the warmth relaxes my stomach and takes away the stab-you-in-the-gut-and-laugh hunger pang! Soaked Chia seeds – full of Omega 3, soluble fiber and other goodies and great for filling up a belly for relatively few calories. Non-starchy vegetables for an eat as much as you like buffet!

8) Don’t cut out food from your diet, crowd it out! Once you have a good understanding of what you should be eating on a daily basis, the foods you shouldn’t be eating almost become a non-issue. Don’t obsess about what you will be missing out on, and rather think about all the delicious food you are going to stock up on and enjoy from day to day. Make sure there is no room in your budget, your trolley, your kitchen cupboards and, above all, your tummy for the wrong types of food! If you eat something on a regular basis, make it earn its place in your diet. Research its nutritional profile, understand what it does to your hormones, and make sure its benefits outweigh its disadvantages. If a food is not worthy of a regular place in your diet, don’t have it in your home. Make sure home is a “safe eating” zone. This ensures that foods that should only be eaten as occasional treats are not easily accessible and tempting. We all face enough temptations as we live in the real world and we certainly don’t need them in our own kitchens!

Before starting with this approach my relationship with food was troubled to say the least. I didn’t like to think about food. I never cooked, and seldom did grocery shopping. I could never tell you in advance what I was going to eat for my next meal, and when you asked me what I felt like eating I would struggle to tell you, although it definitely wasn’t “vegetables!” I lived from meal to meal – ate at a restaurant, got take out and if I did prepare something it was usually a sandwich. Worst of all, although I craved it constantly, I didn’t actually enjoy my food, even the so-called delicious junk food. Now I know exactly what I am going to eat, grocery shopping is done decisively and with military precision and I really look forward to every meal!

9) Every meal should be utterly delicious and fill you with pleasure and delight. I am finally beginning to figure it out – in addition to managing hunger and eliminating cravings, it is really important to me to love the food I eat! People who struggle with weight often develop a lot of emotional issues round food that involve shame, guilt and obsessive compulsive behaviors and erroneously conclude that they are “bad” for liking food so much and that they need to suppress their appetites and put food as far out of their mind as possible. Extreme dieting can just be another part of this dysfunctional dynamic. Sooner or later your body will rebel and force you do perform the basic functions you need to stay alive, be it breathing or eating. Learning that it is healthy and normal to openly love food and derive pleasure from enjoying it is a big part of adopting a sustainable, healthy eating plan. There are so many healthy foods that deserve a place in our diets, so if you aren’t enjoying your bill of fare, keep trying out different foods and experimenting. See “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth” by Jonny Bowden for ideas.

10) Prepare your own food! The first thing I learned in the Hunger Games was that when it comes to feeding myself, I am the only person I can trust! Until further notice everyone with an economic interest in my food supply is guilty until proven innocent. I have also discovered that the manufactures of processed foods are horrible chefs! They actually don’t know how to prepare food at all, they just know how to manipulate combinations of sugar, salt and fat to promote addictive eating behaviors. They literally have this down to a science, but I bet if you gave them a basket of fruit and vegetables and told them to turn it into a meal a kid would eat they would be at a complete loss. This is why the “healthy version” of any processed food tastes like cardboard – because you have restricted the only ingredients the processed food industry understands. The flavors in processed and fast foods are simple, overpowering and boring. Once you learn to enjoy complex, subtly flavored, balanced and artistically prepared dishes, the fast food alternatives quickly become disappointing at best and unpalatable at worst. Unfortunately many restaurants are not much better. If you do eat out, go to a good restaurant with a great chef who is an artist with fresh local produce and understands portion control. You will have a more enjoyable meal and it won’t do your waistline any damage.

So there you have it. This has turned out to me a much longer post than I intended. In my defense, everything I have written has been enormously helpful to me and I hope that at least some of it will be to you too!